Quotes About Writing

You must learn to be three people at once: writer, character, and reader.

There's a hardening of the culture. Reality TV has lowered the standards of entertainment. You're left wondering about the legitimacy of relationships. It's probably harder to entertain the same people with a more classic form of writing, and romantic comedies are a classic genre.

Movies don't look hard, but figuring it out, getting the shape of it, getting everybody's character right and having it be funny, make sense and be romantic, it's creating a puzzle. Yes, having been a writer for so long, I have an awareness of when things are going awry, but it doesn't mean I know how to fix them.

And as for writing my poetry, he claimed the toil of it was too much strain. Toil? Writing is my life. It is not toil. And he cannot stop me.

I reached for the notebook which was always close by. All thoughts of composing epic poems of Greek heroes had left me. The words that often burst from my onto the paper in recent days would be considered mere nothings to the world, but they were everything to me . . . They were the pourings of my heart FOR my heart . . .

Provost John Mark Reynolds, for a position as professor and scholar in residence that gave me time to write Finding Truth.

To be human is to write, to compose, to create, and to dream. So is to think, to test, and to know why.

Writing fiction has always, for me, been an alchemy of turning pain into poetry, ugliness into beauty. It has been a kind of redemption.

Our house is quiet, small and plain, and yet its rooms run far and wide. A hundred pencils, swift as rain, writing on sheets of beaten gold would not be quick enough to hold the strange adventures shadows hide...

What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.

Writing is storytelling, and storytelling, after all, is play." Naomi Alderman

Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.

To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.

La novela que yo escribí es una novela sin puntos ni comas. No tenía ganas de ponérselas. Y explico por qué. Las comas son como los pasos. Los pasos producen cansancio y yo no tenía ganas de cansarme, me sentía sin fuerzas y no quería caminar, sino sentarme y recostarme.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. "When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral," said Carl Hiaasen—and he writes comic novels.

It is odd that we never question the feasibility of a football team practicing long hours for one game; yet in writing we rarely give ourselves the space for practice.

Know that you will eventually have to leave everything behind; the writing will demand it of you.

Writers live twice. They go along with their regular life, are as fas as anyone in the grocery store, crossing the street, getting dressed for work in the morning. But there's another part of them that they have been training. The one that lives every second at a time. That sits down and sees their life again and goes over it. Looks at the texture and details.

Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

Too often we take notes on writing, we think about writing but never do it. I want you to walk into the heart of the storm, written words dripping off hair, eyelids, hanging from hands.

If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.

Sometimes people say to me, "I want to write, but I have five kids, a full-time job, a wife who beats me, a tremendous debt to my parents," and so on. I say to them, "There is no excuse. If you want to write, write. This is your life. You are responsible for it. You will not live forever. Don't wait. Make the time now, even if it is ten minutes once a week.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.